Yes and I’m finding this an increasing problem when using Obsidian and other markdown editors.
Although if the school is eligible for any of the Microsoft discounting, that license is super-cheap. I think a friend of mine got a 4-year license for like $40?
Adding to this, I know a prof at a business school, and they go one step further. They don’t just require Excel, they require students to go get an Excel certification. Apparently the school went around to businesses and asked them what they wanted from people entering the field, and documented expertise in Excel was high on the list.
Personally, I still really like Numbers. And I’m conversant in Google Sheets. But if I were throwing a resume out there for a business-world job, I’d make sure I’d brushed up on my MS Office suite.
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What is it about Numbers that you like?
In other words, One (dev?), who has a hammer, trying to make everything into nails, so he can rule with his hammer, apparently, does not cut it?
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The other day, on a PKM tool Slack forum, there were (several) requests for “formulae” in their “new” Tables feature. It’s like we’re going back to Visicalc, or Lotus 123, era.
Unless I’m mistaken, the motivation behind Markdown, as LaTeX, is to separate content from presentation. You can write a document in Markdown, then decide later what size the H1 text should be, whether citations should be APA or IEEE, whether to produce a PDF or docx, etc.
People have grown accustomed to doing what used to be called desktop publishing as they are writing content, and they don’t even realize they are doing it.
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Document creation and document editing should be two different beasts. For document creation, there should absolutely be a separation between content and presentation(Markdown, LaTex, heck even WordPerfect show codes). I love using markdown for short content - email, blog posts, notes. I do not want to fiddle with fonts and decide what is header, bold etc…
The other aspect of document creation is something that resides in the fog of my understanding. Why are we trying to imitate the printed page when creating a document? Scrivener, Ulysses, Ginko, Word Outliner, outliners and mind maps, web pages ,Obsidian (and similar apps) are trying to escape the bounds of the bounds of the printed page. Why do we need to scroll endlessly? Why does writing have to occur sequentially?,Can a document be created or read in an ad hoc manner(tags, links, searches), where pertinent sections appear as needed (like a create your own adventure).Perhaps now I am conflating note taking(Zettelkasten, LYT)and document creation, but do they necessarily have to be different ?
I think the next revolution in document creation occurs where we realize that there really are no pages. I wish my 20th century brain could figure out how this would work exactly. If there are no pages, do we need our document editing to imitate an old paradigm - like buggy whips in the area of the automobile.
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There are people who are and have been thinking about how to make reading non-sequential. Hypertext stories have been around a while, but haven’t really reached a large audience. I haven’t thought deeply about this. It could be the mismatch between how life unfolds that we are familiar with (sequentially over time) and the nonlinearity of hypertext. It could be the requirement to keep waypoints in ones mind when each branch is taken (of course reader software will have breadcrumbs, but we need our own mental breadcrumbs too).
Hypertext, to me, is kind of like being given someone’s Obsidian vault and saying, “Here, there’s a story here, knock yourself out.”
One of the difficult parts of writing, for me, is how to present the several things that someone needs to understand before going forward. Readers need to know these things in parallel, yet they need to be presented sequentially and coherently.
This is a very helpful perspective that helps me resolve a frustration I’ve had. I’ve been thinking of Obsidian, etc., as an editor AND a substitute for Pages/Word. An example of the frustration has been the terrible experience of producing a “finished” product from Obsidian. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that editors are not intended (or at least not yet capable) of being a good editor and producing a great final product. I’m making final revisions to my document workflow to leverage the strengths of apps as they are intended to be used (or at least as far as their capabilities enable):
- Obsidian for PKM/Research
- Ulysses for book writing and exporting to Word (Word needed for proper citation work)
- Apple Notes for meeting notes and personal reference
- DT as a utility for file conversation, OCR, etc.
- Drafts for quick and dirty text entry and sending to another app or to an email
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I will have to agree, it is difficult to follow someone else’s thoughts in a mind map, tinderbox document or obsidian vault. Admittedly, I do not read hyper text fiction. I like reading my fiction in a sequential manner. However, nonfiction, especially if I am on familiar ground can sometimes be processed as the most relevant and interesting first - what things are of the most value, then what things do I need to fill in the gaps.
I wonder if I am confusing creating a document for general reading vs one for my own understanding(note taking ?).
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Because we have yet to have a device that is infinitely wide and infinitely tall and yet that we can easily carry around in our pocket.
Because, when reading a document on devices of finite width and finite height, one’s progress through is advanced either by “flipping over a page of finite length + width” or “scrolling a page of infinite length + variable width (e.g. reflow)”. The former is a long tradition. The latter is a recent invention.
Because, in the grand scheme of things, folks have their (strongly held) preferences for which of the above two methods is always to be honored regardless of platform and/or always to be avoided for certain types of documents and because tradition still holds rather strong sway (for subjective as well as objective reasons).
Finally, I take one issue here. Markdown was not a language developed to translate text to a finitely-sized printed page. In fact, markdown remains (stubbornly) insistent on avoiding this outcome in an easily realizable way (e.g. I am still waiting for someone to tell me the command to insert a page break in printing out a markdown document). LaTeX was a language that was from the start developed to translate text to a finitely-sized printed page. Do not (ever) put markdown with LaTeX as an equivalence in this regard.
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JJW
I think so much of computing is geared toward finding analogs in the physical world to make it easier for people to use. Even the most basic things like files and folders are analogs from the real world. Instead of people asking for the data on track 5, sectors 3 - 10, the file system allows you to name files and organize them into folders.
When the iPhone first came out, Apple tried to get rid of this file in folder concept. You opened the app first and worked with a list of documents inside the app. As we know this didn’t work very well and we’re back to files and folders to organize our data on iOS devices.
I think the same thing is true with documents. If a document is long, you want to have pages so you can skip around. The kindle used to just have locations, but they brought back the idea of pages into their ebooks now. It’s all just bits and bytes, but that is too abstract for most people to handle. We need some affordances from the real world to make sense of the data on our computing devices.
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The concept of pages adds a third dimension to these databases that we call “books.”
We humans are good at locating things in three dimensions (e.g. finding the stream with good water), and I think adding a third dimension by using pages was a natural progression from scrolls to codices, and finally to books.
Now computers give us the ability to revert to using scrolls (which were largely abandoned) again, only in a more ergonomic form.
But even though we can just flip the scroll wheel (like scrolling through microfiche, also not popular) to navigate in two dimensions, I just don’t think that is ideal - no matter the device. There are usability factors that support paper being largely letter or A4 sized, and why books are all about the same size. These same usability factors are at play in the double-column layout for scientific article publication - such as to help ones eyes return to the correct next line.
I think this needs some context, and I admit I am not an expert. Knuth’s motivation for creating TeX and Lamport’s motivation for creating LaTeX, were to make page layout a more automatic process. This was also part of the separation of content and presentation. If ones LaTeX source is filled with \newpages and/or \clearpages, it is a fight against the design of these systems.
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Yes.
Yes.
The two statements are not to be combined to say that one should never have access to a\clearpage command, just that one should know how to use it properly.
We might agree that LaTeX insists that its final output always goes to a finitely sized “page” object while markdown insists that its final output must never be forced to finite dimensions. The detriments in LaTeX appear when you try to write a Web-page with it. The detriments of markdown appear when you try to write a structured document with it.
In summary, I spend too much agonizing time trying to use ePub formatted textbooks effectively, hence my strong dislike to join the “markdown (and equivalent) is the next best thing in document editing” band wagons.
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JJW
This suggestion proves your point but you can use \newpage in pandoc Markdown and it will be correctly parsed when pandoc converts the Markdown to a PDF. Obviously stretching what Markdown is designed to do, but if you’ve written everything in Markdown and don’t wish to redo it in a different format for page breaks, it’s a possible solution.
Non-PDF textbooks are the bane of my existence, and I think that goes to show that Markdown et. al will not replace the digital “printed page” but will probably grow to equal it. There are a lot of scenarios where Markdown’s anti-structure works out for digital-age text, but an equal number of scenarios that require some sort of a defined structure.
You guys know that Markdown was designed by John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, in support of his infinitely scrolling weblog, right? Markdown was intended to be converted to HTML and displayed on the web. Gruber has resisted any changes to his original vision for Markdown but that hasn’t stopped anyone else from taking it and running with it.
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I know that very well. But hey, the syntax exists and it works for far more than was originally imagined.
Well, run with it then but don’t complain when it doesn’t work for all use cases!
No complaint intended, I think we ran into some sort of misunderstanding. But agreed anyhow 
@ThatNerd, come on, there’s an entire thread above you expressing disappointment with Markdown and complaints. I was directing my comments to the thread.